Lightning Talks

Crowdsourcing from NZ

by Ben Healey

  • Rant about Amazon US not allowing the outside world to participate because of terrorists
  • Then talked about various services like http://crowdflower.com/

Web Socket

by Alexander Abushkevich

  • Provides mechanism for bi-direction data exchange between server and clients
  • Seems to more practice thabn XmlHTTPRequests for long polling
  • many python libraries

Note

I think Zed Shaw has ranted about web sockets. Need to ask him.

window.onload(){
    // TODO is this how this really works?
    var s = WebSocket('http://blarg.service.org/service')
    s.do_action

}

Google App Engine

by Greg Fawcett

  • Google will be charging for it soon
  • old version from Django
  • Lots of frameworks ported there: Web2py, Zope, old versions of Pyramid
  • Sends out inbound and outbound email
  • NoSQL database BigTable
  • Runs with a Google version of memcached. Question: How do you ask for it?
  • Has scheduled task system
  • Google App Engine apparently ran the Royal Wedding website

Wiki-to-speech Robot Presentations

by John Graves

  • Converts presenters notes to speech
  • This way it will convert your slide shows to full presentations

Pythonic Slide Generation

by Leon Mathews

  • Wrote some restructured text
  • Using rst2pdf to generate slides
  • Created a slides.style file to define the results better
  • Generated PDF slides

Note

TODO - ask him to provide source code and instructions

Valgrind Memcheck

by Tim Penhey

  • Humans are bad at finding memory leaks
  • Not really a python talk, but rather a review of how to check for memory leaks.
  • Created an alias to run his valgrind check with all the arguments already defined

Sorry state of the New Zealand Job Market

by Juergen Brendel

  • At NZ bookstore only could find 1 book on Python and one Django 0.96 books
  • Need more Python jobs
  • Need to expand the community

What Parkour Taught Me About Programming

by Danver Braganza (Organizes his clothes into an array)

  • You learn by doing
  • You don’t become a good developer by wishing you were a developer and watching the Social Network
  • The best practitioners get better by taking their work home with them.
  • Learn how to apply your knowledge to other avenues

Dependency Management in Python with Buildout

by Brad Milne

  • They control the environments very tightly so they don’t run into the problems I’ve had.
  • His examples also seem much cleaner than the sort of thing I’ve suffered through

Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should OR An evil web framework/thing

by Aurynn Shaw

  • Generators
  • Generators.send()
  • Wrote a web framework that uses send to store sessions
  • Runs on twisted
  • But has a race condition
  • Silly prototype
  • code: https://github.com/aurynn/evil

Qtile: A Python Tiling Window Manager

by Aldo Cortesi

Job security in Python

by Chris Neugebauer

Note

This is going to hurt my talk but it’s funny

  • “Readability” is not a virtue if you want job security

  • PEP 0008 is not a good style code if you want to keep your job

  • Contention: Readabiluty sucks

    • Other people can comprehend your code
    • You can maintain your own code - less billable hours
    • Your code will be more

How do you write unmaintainable code?

  • Bad variable names

  • Metaprogramming

    • Breaks the help function
    • all kinds of ways to bury logic
  • monkey patching

    • Roll your own standard library